Nov 2, 2021

Off-boarding gracefully — setting your team up for success

I recently left my role as Director or User Research at Babylon. I thought it might be helpful for me to share how I went about off-boarding myself for anyone else in this position.

I had a three month notice period so I was able to have a fairly calm and smooth transition out of the business. …

I’m joining Facebook

Social media has changed the world. Facebook (or Meta as it is now) started that. I’m excited to be joining a company who are building tools for the next chapter and beyond.

Like most people I go through love / hate phases with social media. It’s safe to say that my career has been changed by using the major platforms though — mostly for the better.

I’d go so far as to say that social media has been instrumental in my success.

In 2007, I was working at the BBC and was asked to join a working group…

Guiding your team strategy with User Research Principles

We often hear that Ops is all about process, efficiency, speed and scale but does saving time and money have a real and lasting impact? What about quality? Are we doing the right work or are we scaling poor quality research? Is the work visible? Are we learning from our insights or are we repeating the same studies? Does anyone care about governance or are we skipping over the ‘boring’ work in favour of speed?

For the last seven months I’ve been leading the User Research team at Babylon Health in London. We are distributed across three offices and in two time zones (UK/US). The researchers are embedded in Tribes across the user experience. …

Experiments in Remote Design Leadership — Month 3

Month 3 at Babylon Health as the Interim Director of Research has passed by in a blink. If this was a permanent role, it would be time for my probation review. It feels like all I have done for the last three months is to sit in one to ones…

Announcing the UXInsight Research Ops Day programme

Tickets for the Research Ops day at UXInsight in the Netherlands are on sale now. We’re really excited to introduce the programme for our first ever Research Ops conference!

The backstory

Last year I did a short talk about Research Ops at UXInsight in the Netherlands. I enjoyed listening to the other talks and appreciated the friendly vibe of the event. …

A decade in UX.

I’ve seen a lot of ‘10 year challenge’ type posts on social media over the last few weeks. What’s interesting about a lot of them, is that this is the first decade many of us have documented so much of our lives on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on. …

Experiments in Remote Design Leadership — Month 2

I’m two months into an Interim Research Leadership role at Babylon Health. What have a learnt this month?

To pace myself better.

Month 1 saw me charging at 300 miles an hour. I spent a fair bit of time away from home and most of my time in meetings. This was really helpful to…

Experiments in Remote Design Leadership — Month 1

Last month, I started at Babylon Health as the Interim Director of Research. It’s the first time I’ve performed an interim role so I thought it might be useful to share my approach and any learnings along the way.

Caretaker or Change Maker?

When I joined, the team had been without leadership for a…

Getting Started with Research Ops

Over the last few months we’ve been working on providing and sharing ideas of how you can start your Research Ops practice. Read on to find out more.

In the Summer we introduced you to the Eight Pillars of User Research. These eight pillars are the broad areas of User…

How to become a Research Ops super hero — Rea’s Story

I would like to introduce you to someone. She’s someone you may know. She maybe someone in your scrum team. She maybe one of many or she maybe the only one in the company. …